Hacker News Reader

Comment by localghost3000 | Hacker News Reader

Highly recommend nb[0] for this type of stuff. I've been using it for a few years now and am still getting surprised by all the stuff it can do.

Some others have said it but the only problem with a lot of these systems is that by their very nature they are a better experience on a desktop than on mobile. Joplin is the only one I've used that even attempts to solve that problem. Even when you have one that works on mobile its a second class experience IMO. I used to try really hard to find a note capture system that I loved that worked in both environments. These days I just use apple notes on mobile and nb on desktop.

[0] https://xwmx.github.io/nb/

View on HN

In terms of “just giving up and taking simple mobile notes” I can also endorse Google Keep iOS - natural affordances match my typical eng/Phil related use cases better than Apple notes.

I used keep for a bit. I liked it and agree it does the same thing apple notes does. I settled on apple notes for no other reason than a weird sense of minimalism if that makes sense. I've installed so many note apps over the years that I was spending more time on that than actually using something. I decided enough was enough. Apple notes has flaws (especially if you use other platforms) but they all do. I got tired of worrying about it and just decided to go all in warts and all.

the one thing I miss in apple notes is being able to drag and drop items of a list with checkboxes to re-order them.

You can do that, just click and hold on the checkboxes.

I’ve had nb marked for investigation forever. It looks like it’s been steadily developed since I first saved it for later.

So do you store all your files in DropBox and the use Joplin to access them via mobile? I’m intrigued by how the two interact.

NB syncs via git. It’s automatic once you point it at a remote origin.

I don’t even try to access via mobile. You can but it’s a second class experience. I just use Apple notes and transfer anything I care about over to nb about once a week or so.

You probably can get a mobile thing going w Joplin or obsidian but it would require a little bit of scripting to get nb to pick up any new notes you create as it relies upon .index files at the root of each directory to know it’s contents instead of doing I/O operations. I assume this is for performance reasons.

That does look cool. Would this work fine if presented with my Obsidian "vault", eg a folder full of markdown files? Looks like both apps like to operate on the same data.

I've used obsidian with nb before but you can't just open nb inside your vault and have it immediately work. nb uses .index files at the root of each directory to know what to display in the cli (I assume so it doesn't have to do a ton of I/O operations). You'd probably need to spend a bit of time understanding that stuff so you can write up a script or something to coordinate between the two. I ultimately just ditched obsidian and went with my afore mentioned apple notes/nb hybrid approach.

Ha, thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com